Editorial
The global COVID-19 crisis has brought out the best and worst in humanity – solidarity and insanity.
The venerable Bangkok Post reported last week that about 150 Thai and foreign customers were arrested at a nightclub quite appropriately called Insanity in Bangkok last week. According to the report, there was no social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and most of the clubbers weren’t wearing facemasks. Some discarded drugs were found on the premises to boot.
Alas, manifestations of insanity are one of the adverse consequences of the novel coronavirus pandemic. For instance, Bill Gates has become the voodoo doll of COVID-19 conspiracy theorists who accuse him of leading efforts by global elites to depopulate the world, the BBC reported in June. Another conspiracy theory – which is particularly popular with the US political far right – claims that the virus was intentionally “created by Beijing’s covert bio-weapons programme.”
According to the respected Cornell Alliance for Science, this outlandish conspiracy theory can be easily debunked as there is scientific evidence – thanks to genetic sequencing – that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has entirely natural origins as a zoonotic virus.
I agree with New Zealand Rhodes scholar and journalist James Bertram (1910-93) who pointed out in his seminal 1938 book ‘First Act in China – The Story of the Sian Mutiny’ that “most Westerners who are aware of China at all see it with the eyes of the Hollywood film producers – a world of make-believe exceedingly rich in material of scenarios.” Bertram also wrote in the book that editors in the West “know that their public can take China only in small doses, with a suitable dash of the fantastic. Marco Polo set a literary tradition that has proved very long-lived.”
Well, another insane consequence of the pandemic has been the unenlightened approach by rival public opinion camps towards science. On the one hand there is the quasi-religious hostility to science per se such as among the most low-browed segments of Trump’s infamous “base”, on the other hand there is the naïve faith in science by those who wrongly believe that scientists have the absolute monopoly on wisdom. Of course, they don’t because science is a never-ending process of lots of trials and lots of errors. That’s how scientific progress is gradually being achieved.
Karl Popper (1902-94), the Vienna-born, London-based epistemologist whom I greatly admire for his groundbreaking work on the theory of science, wrote that “the game of science is, in principle, without end. He [or she] who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.” Popper succinctly described what he regarded as the self-correcting method by which science proceeds as follow: “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.”*
That’s, for instance, the scientifically correct but laborious procedure to come up with an effective and safe COVID-19 vaccine that any level-headed person is waiting for.
National leaders should never meekly listen to what scientists are telling them but instead prudently weigh up the pros and cons before making up their minds on how to proceed – such as to determine which is the best way to protect their citizens from COVID-19.
Lamentably, politicians in Europe and the Americas in particular have been insanely erratic in their responses to the novel coronavirus menace, which has killed hundreds of thousands of their citizens and is causing immense damage to their economies. Western politicians seem to find it especially difficult to tell their electorates that in times of a potentially lethal crisis individual liberties must play second fiddle to the collective rights of their bodies politic. It’s a matter of life and death, period!
However, on the bright side, the pandemic has also generated a wave of solidarity among individuals, communities and nations.
In Brazil, for instance, Fátima Sanson, a 61-year-old cancer survivor has kept her Christmas tradition of dressing up as “Mamãe Noel” (“Mamma Santa Claus”) and giving out toys and hugs to impoverished kids in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais state, notwithstanding the COVID-19 pandemic. What is her solution to circumventing social distancing? She made herself a plastic “hug curtain”, found an assistant to disinfect it between embraces, dressed up in her bright red suit, and set up her annual toy and food giveaway in a poor neighbourhood.**
Solidarity is needed on any conceivable level of humanity, individually and collectively, not just during the COVID-19 pandemic. The distribution of novel coronavirus vaccines is one of the solidarity challenges that the international community is facing.
President Xi Jinping told the World Health Assembly (WHA) in a virtual gathering back in May that “COVID-19 vaccine development and deployment in China, when available, will be made a global public good.” Xi also pledged that “this will be China’s contribution to ensuring vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.”
Let us hope that all members of the “global village” will follow China’s commitment to international solidarity.
Macau also needs to maintain an extra-large dose of solidarity during the COVID-19 calamity – solidarity between residents and non-resident workers, employers and employees, government and civil society, and with those families who have been separated for months due to international travel restrictions and the local entry ban on foreign nationals. Solidarity between Macau and the rest of the country must also remain particularly strong during the pandemic.
*For those interested in epistemology, I recommend Popper’s ‘Objective Knowledge’ and ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’, although I admit that they aren’t exactly relaxing Christmas reading…
**We published an AFP story headlined “COVID-19, cancer can’t stop Brazil’s ‘Mamma Santa Claus’” about Fátima Sanson’s annual act of solidarity on P. 9 last Friday.
– Harald Brüning
